Why is it that the quality of my homevideos when transferred from miniDV to DVD-R is not as good as movie DVD's that have been copied using DVDshrink to DVD-R?

I have been using TMPGEnc for the conversion and have followed the settings suggested by the article http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html not happy with that I also tried different variations using the calculator http://dvd-hq.info/Calculator.html. Then I burn using Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2 using settings "don't change compliant video" and even setting to highest quality MPEG.

The quality is OK but not what I expected from a DVD. My question is why do DVDshrunk DVD-R's look so much better than the best I can achieve with my homevideos?

There are many different factors that influence the final DVD quality.

You are comparing two completely different things. In one case, something shot on film, lit by a professional cinematographer, fine-tuned in post-production, etc., and in the other a home video created with amateur equipment, probably without much time spent on lighting or post-production.

The simple fact that you're using (interlaced) video instead of film makes it much harder for the MPEG compressor to work. The result is that you end up needing a higher bitrate to keep the same level of quality (the advantage is movement will look more fluid than if the frames were not interlaced).

Also, video (especially if shot in low light situations) has a lot more noise than film, which again makes it harder to compress. This gets even worse if your camera is a single-CCD model (single-CCD cameras don't have full colour information for each pixel; red and blue has only 1/4th of the resolution, and green has only half).

If you're shooting in NTSC DV (probably not, in your case), you'll also get pretty bad horizontal colour bleeding, due to the incompatibility between the NTSC DV and MPEG-2 sampling patterns (PAL doesn't have this problem, as long as the camera has 3 CCDs).

If you want to compare two compressors, you need to feed them the same source footage, or at least footage of the same original quality.

To check if your authoring program is doing something it shouldn't, try playing back the MPEG-2 file (created by TMPGEnc) with a software player, such as PowerDVD, and compare that with the DVD created by your authoring program (Movie Factory). They should look exactly the same. If they don't, then Movie Factory is reprocessing the video.

If you are having any specific problem with the video, there might be some way to fix it, but you'll have to describe the problem a bit better.

I can't watch the mpeg file as when I try to watch it using windows media player, all I can see is black.

The problem I am getting is that the resulting dvd has small but in my opinion unnaceptable blockiness. As I have said, I have tried various settings using the guides above and am still not happy. I am sure that this can't be the best quality you can get because I have heard others that are happy watching their dvd's on HDTV whilst mine isn't.

I failed to mention that I capture the DV onto my computer using Pinnacle software. Could this have anything to do with the quality? the avi file seems to be much better than the resulting dvd. Another thing that may be worth mentioning is that the video is 16 minutes long and captures as approx 3GB into avi then becomes approx 1GB into mpeg.

To check if your authoring program is doing something it shouldn't, try playing back the MPEG-2 file (created by TMPGEnc) with a software player, such as PowerDVD

jempot wrote:

I can't watch the mpeg file as when I try to watch it using windows media player, all I can see is black.

Media Player is not a good choice to play back interlaced video anyway. Use PowerDVD or WinDVD, or some other DVD player. Make sure hardware acceleration (in PowerDVD's options) is turned off, since it worsens the image quality (turn it on only if you have a very slow CPU).

jempot wrote:

The problem I am getting is that the resulting dvd has small but in my opinion unnaceptable blockiness. As I have said, I have tried various settings using the guides above and am still not happy.

Can you please post the exact settings you used (the ones that you were happier with)? Namely the encode mode, bitrate, resolution, GOP structure, motion search mode and interlacing mode.

Also, did you see this blockiness on a TV (using a set-top player), or just on the computer screen?

jempot wrote:

I failed to mention that I capture the DV onto my computer using Pinnacle software. Could this have anything to do with the quality?

If you're using a DV card that creates DV AVIs, then the brand is irrelevant; the card is simply transferring the data from the tape to your hard disk, without changing it.

Are you feeding the original AVIs to TMPGEnc, or are you doing some editing? If so, in which program?

This situation is now extremely irritating me as I initially bought a set-top Panasonic DMR-HS2 dvd recorder for the purpose of producing home video DVD’s. Not happy with the blockiness produced by this, I then decided to buy a PC DVD recorder seeing as the DVD-R produced of our Great Barrier Reef holiday that we bought from a videographer turned out great. It has now been months since I bought this PC based recorder without any success in producing a “great” quality DVD. I need HELP!

Here are my complete settings:

This was the original settings suggested by the article on this website.
Stream set to ‘system video+audio’

My best results so far are from setting the following changes.
Rate control mode: CBR
Rate control settings: 9406
Number of I pictures: 1
Number if P pictures: 4
Number of B pictures: 0

Seeing as the clip I am working with is only 17 minutes long, I would imagine that this setting would not allow me to put much on one DVD-R.

I saw the blockiness on a Philips 68cm TV playing from a Panasonic set-top player. But on my Teac 80cm TV, you can barely see the blockiness. But I would attribute this to TV quality rather than to anything relevant to my problem.

The capture card I use is actually an off the shelf firewire card rather than an actual Pinnacle packaged card if that’s any different to a DV card.

No point in using such short GOPs if scene detection is enabled.
Use a GOP with I=1 P=14 B=0.

If you have space to spare on the disc, use CBR at 9 Mb/s.

If you need to save space, use 2-pass VBR, set the average to the highest possible value (use the calculator), the maximum to 9000, and the P-picture spoilage to -100.

Also, set the VBV buffer size to 224. TMPGEnc should set it automatically, but doesn't hurt to be explicit.

If this doesn't improve things, and if you have Premiere or Media studio, try loading your clip into the timeline and then exporting to TMPGEnc via a frameserver. It's possible there is some problem when TMPGEnc is decompressing the original AVI (in which case, the damage would be happening before the compression, so no change to the settings would fix it). By exporting through a frameserver, the decompression would be made by the editing program.

That error ("parameter is incorrect") usualy indicates an error on the disc or drive that is being read. Run a repair utility on your hard drive, you might have some bad sectors.

Also, try playing the MPEG file on PowerDVD (or WinDVD) and see if a) it plays correctly and b) if the quality is good.

Never use 9.8 Mb/s for the video, since that will usually make the final disc's bitrate go beyond DVD specification. Make sure that video + audio are less than 9.4 Mb/s or so (if you are using uncompressed audio, keep the video under 8 Mb/s).

Also, before trying to burn you project to a disc, compile it to a title set (VIDEO_TS folder) and open the title set with a software DVD player (ex., PowerDVD). That way you avoid wasting discs if something is wrong (ex., bad quality, etc.).

I tried compiling it to the hard drive and that seems to work fine. Would you say that the reason for the error would be that the resulting bitrate exceeds the DVD-R/RW's capabilities.

No, the bitrate limit is checked by the authoring program. If it was too high, it would give you an error during compilation. The error you're getting is during recording, so it's something that's going wrong either while reading the source files or actually recording the data to the disc.

If you were using an old hard drive, I would say the problem could be a buffer underrun (hard drive can't read fast enough to keep the DVD recorder fed), but if your drive is new, I doubt it. Still, recording at a lower speed might fix it.

The actual recording routines in DVD Movie Factory and DVD Workshop are eidentical, so if one fails the other will probably fail too.

If your authoring program has that option, compile the project to a disc image, and then burn the image using a different program (ex., Nero).

Or you can try recording the VIDEO_TS folder directly, but a disc image is usually safer, because it ensures the files are in the right order.

The thing is is that I’ve had no problem burning to disc when my settings were at 8 Mb/s. Although I think it’s irrelevant to my situation, I’ll try what you have suggested. If you have any other theories, please let me know.

While you're writing to the DVD, data is written at a very high speed; the video DVD bitrate limit has nothing to do with it (modern DVD drives can write at more than 80 Mb/s - that's 8 times higher than the video DVD limit).

Keeping the bitrate below 8 Mb/s might make the resulting disc more compatible with older players, but it won't make any difference during recording. The recording speed is the same, regardless of the file's bitrate.

Or maybe I make somwhere mistake (even little) ? Quality is very good, on 1 DVD disc I can write ~80-95 min. Or I can/should reduce average bitrate and minimum (and get the same quality) ? Example:

Rate control settings:
· Av. 5500
· Max. 8000
· Min. 3000

or

Rate control settings:
· Av. 5000
· Max. 8000
· Min. 2500

It's very important to me to get the best video quality (with VRB and 1 DVD can hold ~85-90min of my video), because I have ~30 miniDV tapes, whitch I will in this 2-3 months write on DVD disc's). Then I will know only one, but right way all this embody
I need your advice _________________21"IBM|9550XT|AMD-1700+|512DDR|120+80GB|DVD+/-RW/411S|Audigy+5300|K7VTA3|WinXP